1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of disaster preparedness including search and rescue operations and pertains particularly to methods and apparatus for optimizing the efforts of first responders in the field during the progression of a disaster and after a disaster has unfolded.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
In the field of disaster recovery, federal, state, and local governments have created contingency plans for preparing for and mitigating the effects of natural disasters such as hurricane, floods, fires, tornados, and other disaster types that might be envisioned by community planning personnel. One area of such planning is in the provision of early warnings to persons that are at risk in the occurrence of a disaster. Early warning types are generally specific to the type of disaster predicted and instructions for protecting oneself also vary with the type of disaster that is forewarned.
Current limitations with early warning systems are apparent with certain types of disasters. For example, tornado risk for an area may be predicted as much as days before the area is affected, however the exact locations, severity level, and time of occurrence of the possible tornados spawned by the system, if any, cannot be predicted until it is spotted by observers reading radar or spotting on the ground. In such cases, alerts may be propagated from weather emergency stations to sirens, mobile weather radios, televisions, telephones, and in some cases internet-connected computers. Other limitations in early warning scenarios include fast moving fires and flash flooding. Although general risk can be adequately predicted for general areas, immediate notification of events in actual progress is associated with much less time between the alert and the occurrence of the event.
Notwithstanding, many persons do not hear sirens or may not receive timely alerts due to many factors such as not having proper or working notification receiving appliances at hand, not hearing sirens, etc. Some persons hear general sirens and receive general alerts, such as county wide alerts, but do not take them seriously as these types of alerts are common when no disaster actually unfolds. Still, more persons who have received instructions for evacuating locations in the target of an unfolding disaster decide not to evacuate and prefer riding out the disaster in progress, often against recommendations of emergency personnel. This may occur even when mandatory evacuation orders are received.
In a system known to the inventor, fixed (hardwired) multi-disaster alarm units may be provided to individual residences, institutions, and other buildings that maybe occupied during the progression of a disaster. Such fixed units enable warnings based on the location information presented by the receiving devices, which is associated to and consistent with geographic location information of the building itself including GPS coordinate location information. Geo-specific information enables warnings to be propagated in a more granular and less general manner relative to an area. For example, warnings may be targeted to a subset or a group of residences in a neighborhood as opposed to simply receiving a countywide general warning.
Persons receiving more targeted alerts may take them much more seriously including following without hesitation any evacuation recommendations associated with such geo-specific warnings. However, many persons may still fail to evacuate, or may be unable to evacuate a location in certain circumstances. Such persons are at much higher risk of injury and death both during the disaster and post disaster when search efforts are underway in the area. First responders who are often the first personnel sent in to an affected disaster zone currently have no idea if there are persons at risk in or under debris resulting from destruction of buildings during the event. Consequently, the area is searched systematically, sometimes house by house and building by building. Priority is given to buildings such as schools, workplaces, malls, airports, or other locations where there might be numbers of injured persons waiting rescue. For residences, priority is given to those residences that were partially or wholly destroyed where persons may be trapped in the debris. The only intelligence leveraged by first responders is intelligence developed post disaster by manual and visual inspection as they move through an area.
Therefore, what is clearly needed is a first-responder resource optimization system that provides an early snapshot of where persons in the path of the disaster were just before the disaster unfolded. A system such as this can reduce the time and cost of rescue and recovery efforts by enabling prioritization of search and rescue efforts to locations were no pre-intelligence of the evacuation status of persons associated to those locations was received prior to or during the disaster.